Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 25
framed to my particular devotion, as this whereof I hold my beliefe, the Church of
England, to whose faith I am a sworne subject, and therefore in a double
obligation, subscribe unto her Articles, and endeavour to observe her Constitutions:
whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my
private reason, or the humor and fashion of my devotion, neither believing this,
because Luther affirmed it, or disapproving that, because Calvin hath disavouched
it. I condemne not all things in the Councell of Trent, nor approve all in the Synod
of Dort. In briefe, where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my Text; where that
speakes, ’tis but my Comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not
the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own
reason. 29
As Thomas Browne begins his own declaration of faith, he affirms the common orthodoxy
shared throughout Western Christianity and states that his own beliefs are not the mindless
following of one denomination over another, but that he has chosen the one that most suits
his private beliefs; however, he leaves open the idea that there can be faithful believers in
the other branches of Christianity. The anxiety that exists in Renaissance England about
categorising Christians into the various sects of Christianity is an anxiety that exists not
because there was so much difference, but because there was so much in common between
the divisions that comprised the Christian Church in England.
As Claire McEachern has stated, ‘Part of the problem with mounting any inquiry
into the social function of religion is not that it is elusive but that it is everywhere’. 30
Religion was everywhere, but as has been shown, it is not just that it was everywhere, but
29 Thomas Brown, Religio Medici, in L. C. Martin (ed.), Religio Medici and Other Works (Oxford, 1964), pp.
5-6.
30 Claire McEachern, ‘Introduction’, in Claire McEachern and Deborah Shuger (eds.), Religion and Culture
in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 6.